115Hassabis recalls that, at that moment, he had an
epiphany: he questioned the purpose of the brilliant
minds in the room competing with each other to win
a zero-sum game. He would go on to play chess at the
highest level, captaining his university team, and
still talks of his continued love of complex games, but
the experience led to him channeling his energy into
something beyond games. “The reason that I could
not become a professional chess player,” he says,
“is that it didn’t feel productive enough somehow.”
Even as the company expands into its new
headquarters, Hassabis maintains that DeepMind
is still a startup, albeit one that is competing on
a world stage – “China is mobilised and the US...
there are serious companies trying to do these
things,” he says. Indeed, the US and the China are
both positioning themselves to standardise the
field to their own advantage, both commercially
and geopolitically. He mentions several times that,
despite having made progress (“small stepping
stones on the way”), there is still a long way to
go in DeepMind’s bigger mission of solving intel-
ligence and building AGI. “I still want us to have
that hunger and the pace and the energy that the
best startups have,” he says.
Innovation is hard and often singular. Building
the processes and culture of an organisation that
will enable it to “make a dent in the universe,” as
Steve Jobs told the team building the Macintosh
computer – and doing so in multiple fields or with
more than one product – is something that few
companies or institutions achieve. As DeepMind
grows, it will be the role of the founders to pursue
the road ahead, while keeping an eye on the
founding principles of a business focused on what
is likely to be the most transformative technology
of the coming years, one fraught with possible
dangers, as well as opportunities.
“You’re going to hit a lot of rough days and, at the
end of the day, trying to make money or whatever
isn’t going to be enough to get you through the
real pain points,” Hassabis says. “If you have a real
passion and you think what you’re doing is really
important, then I feel that will carry you through.” �Greg Williams is the editor of WIREDBack row, l-r: Yori Zwols, research engineering lead; Verity
Harding, co-lead DeepMind ethics and society; Raia Hadsell, research
scientist; Dan Belov, head of engineering; Koray Kavukcuoglu, VP of
research; John Jumper, senior research assistant; Beverley Mallon,
people teams director; David Silver, principal research scientist.
Centre row, l-r: Lorrayne Bennett, research program manager;
Helen King, program manager; Drew Purves, creative lead, Worlds;
Adrian Bolton, director of Worlds; Brittany Smith, policy and
ethics researcher; Chloe Hillier, research program manager.
Front: Praveen Srinivasan, head of DeepMind for GoogleDEEPMIND ONÉ PROTEIN FOLDING
Having reached superhuman performance in arcade games and
chess, DeepMind has turned its focus to one of the toughest
problems in science: predicting 3D shapes of proteins. DNA
contains information about the sequence of a protein’s
building blocks called amino acid residues, but how these
will twist and fold into the intricate chains that form aprotein is difficult to predict and has been challenging
scientists for decades. At an annual protein-folding
competition in 2018, AlphaFold – a product of two years of
work – was able to predict the structure of proteins more
accurately than the other 97 entrants. Understanding the
shape of proteins is a key step in creating new medicines.09-19-FTDeepmind.indd 115 23/07/2019 11:01